Category Archives: Wahhabism

This week, pop singer Ariana Grande vowed to return to Manchester in the wake of the deadly Jihadist attack that killed 22 innocent victims, many of them teen age girls.

Grande posted a letter on Twitter with a message to her fans. While the letter may have been heartfelt, its message demonstrates how so many among us are clueless as to the threat from Islamic jihad. Here are some quotes from the letter, with our commentary after each quote.

“We will never be able to understand why events like this take place…”

Actually, it isn’t difficult to understand at all. Jihadists routinely justify their actions with Islamic scripture. As Bill Warner, PhD of the Center for the Study of Political Islam pointed out not long after the Manchester attack, there is a particular passage from Islamic doctrine that Jihadists use to justify killing civilians, especially women and children. It comes from the foremost Hadith authority in Islam, Bukhari, Volume 4, Book 52, Hadith 256 (the Hadith are sayings, stories and traditions from the life of the Prophet Mohammed):

The Prophet… was asked whether it was permissible to attack the pagan warriors at night with the probability of exposing their women and children to danger. The Prophet replied, “They (i.e. women and children) are from them (i.e. pagans).

In this command, Mohammad established that it is permissible to kill non-combatants in the process of killing a perceived enemy. This has repeatedly provided justification for many Islamic terror attacks.

We may find this hard to accept, but we certainly must come to terms with it and understand what motivates Jihadists.

“We won’t let this divide us. We won’t let hate win.”

This is certainly an admirable sentiment. It’s also symptomatic of a misunderstanding of the nature of our enemy in this war.

In the terrorism of the 1970s and 1980s, carried out by political groups such as the Red Brigades, the Weather Underground, the Baader-Meinhoff gang, the Japanese Red Army, the Irish Republican Army and even the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, there was a mantra: “Kill 10 to scare 10 million.”

The terror attacks of that era had a different aim and a different nature. They were literally meant to terrorize. Each of the groups named above had a specific goal in mind. They were evil and demented to be sure, but they weren’t looking to subjugate the entire world. So, the proper response in those days was to “not let them win” by changing our way of life. The terrorists of the 70s and 80s lived to terrorize, so by not acting scared, we could deny them victory.

Islamic jihad is completely different. It is not meant merely to terrorize us. It is meant to ultimately subjugate us to Islamic rule under a caliphate operated according to the Sharia. Every Jihadist organization has this as its identical goal: the formation of an Islamic State ruled by Sharia.

They don’t just want to scare us. They want to kill enough of us and surround us with enough of them, to achieve victory over us. They aren’t looking just for publicity to spread terror. They want to kill enough of us to make us quit fighting, not just to make us frightened.

This is true apocalyptic terrorism and it represents an existential threat to Western civilization. If you don’t believe that, I suggest you take a much closer look at conditions in Western Europe today and then think back to how life was just 30 years ago in Western Europe. It’s not the same place. Not even close. What will Western Europe look like 30 years from now?

And they couple their military campaign of violent Jihad with a political, cultural, economic and legal campaign of civilizational Jihad. This is a vital point to understand. So, when we say we won’t let “hate” win, we are wide of the mark. This isn’t about mere hate. The enemy loves what they are doing. It is their devotion to their love of Allah and the prophet Mohammed that drives them. We can certainly consider it hate, but that doesn’t bring us to a better understanding of the enemy.

“Hate” isn’t trying to win. Islamic jihadists like the Abedi family are trying to win. Instead of saying “we won’t let hate win,” Grande would have been much more helpful and correct if she had said, “we won’t let the Jihadis win.”

We can’t be sure of what Grande means when she says, “We won’t let this divide us.”

Divide who? The victims themselves? The victims from the perpetrators? The host society from the alien culture that has invaded, chosen not to assimilate and become an incubator for an internal, existential, deadly threat in the form of Islamic jihad?

I’d say the enemy has already drawn the dividing line. How can that not be completely obvious already? How many deadly attacks do we have to endure before our pop culture-dominated society in the West wakes up to reality?

“Our response to this violence must be to come closer together, to help each other, to love more, to sing louder, and to live more kindly and generously than we did before.”

Again, these are certainly admirable sentiments that shouldn’t ever be opposed. We should all endeavor to live our lives this way. In the Judeo-Christian West, these are the kinds of values that we have been taught and must always strive to achieve.

But they cannot be our only response to “this violence.” The enemy is on a mission. There is a reason why he chose to attack a music concert attended largely by young girls. The enemy wanted to show us that there are no lengths to which he won’t go to fight and kill us. He wanted to show us that we are powerless to defend our most innocent and precious. They attacked that concert because they have disdain for us. It was a form of lethal ridicule. They want us to continue to hold and attend such concerts. And we can be sure they will seek to attack those events.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t hold concerts and celebrations. But those concerts and celebrations do not represent, even in a small way, defiance in the face of evil. More concerts will not phase the Jihadists in the slightest.

No, we need a real response to these attacks–and it starts with the realization that we are in a war, a war that most of us in the West deny even exists.

So, by all means let’s love and sing and come closer together, but let’s not delude ourselves into thinking that is the path to victory over the dark forces of Jihad spread now around the globe. Moreover, make no mistake: victory is essential in this fight, even if victory just means denying victory to the Jihadists.

“Music is something that everyone on Earth can share. Music is meant to heal us, to bring us together, to make us happy.”

All this is well and good, but excuse me if I point out that our Jihadist enemies don’t feel the same way about music, particularly Western music (and by Western I don’t mean Marty Robbins ballads). This presents us with a teaching moment. In areas where the Jihadists have achieved their goal of forming an Islamic state, it is customary that music and art are often banished. We saw that when the Ayatollahs seized power in Iran. We saw that when the Taliban took control for a brief time in Afghanistan. When the Islamic State seized significant territory in Iraq and Syria, music and forms of artistic expression were banned and destroyed.

As a female, try driving a car down the street in Saudi Arabia with the windows rolled down with your stereo blaring the latest Ariana Grande tune.

Music doesn’t heal our enemy. It doesn’t bring him closer to us and it doesn’t make him happy. We need to start to understand a mindset, ideology and religious doctrine that is as alien to us in the West as anything from another solar system. Especially since that mindset, ideology and doctrine have as a goal subjecting us, or else…

“We will continue in honor of the ones we lost, their loved ones, my fans and all affected by this tragedy” (Emphasis added)

The attack on the concert goers in Manchester was NOT a “tragedy.” To say so is to dishonor the memory of those lost. A tragedy is an unavoidable event, such as an act of nature or an accident. A tragedy is a tornado or earthquake or tsunami. A tragedy is when a truck driver has a heart attack and careens into oncoming traffic, resulting in death and destruction.

A tragedy is not when a Jihadi steals a truck and purposely runs down innocent victims at a celebration or market.

And what happened in Manchester was not a tragedy.

It was an atrocity. It was an act of war. We better come to terms as a society with the fact that we are at war and, as people, demand that our leaders recognize that fact. We need to quit waiting on our so-called leaders to come around to the reality that we already know. We are at war. The enemy knows it and has about a 20-year head start on us.

Statements like this one from Ariana Grande aren’t helpful toward that end.

There was a time when it was considered necessary and proper to be concerned about possible foreign influences in US government and military service. Way back in 1981 when I first filled out forms as part of the process for joining the US military (it was a DOD form, I don’t remember the number) I had to answer a specific question regarding travel. The question asked if I had traveled to any of a list of nations after certain dates (all communist bloc countries) with a date listed by each nation (the date that each country had turned communist).

Anyone who joined the military in the Cold War era probably remembers this form and this question. If the answer to the question for any of the nations involved was “yes” you had to provide a complete explanation for the reason for the trip, when it took place, etc. Having never visited countries like Cuba, North Korea, East Germany, the Soviet Union, etc., I can’t say that I know what the process would have been had I answered yes.

But the point is, if you wanted to join the US military and you had even visited any communist countries, the Department of Defense wanted to know about it.

Fast forward to today. We are locked in a mortal struggle against a force not unlike communism. In fact, it has been called “communism with a god.” That force is Islam as defined by the Shariah doctrine which forms the basis for it. There are certain countries and organizations that are prominent in the enemy threat doctrine. Yet, to my knowledge, today we have no similar safeguards in place to what the DOD had during the Cold War years to check on the influence of foreign powers on American institutions. For instance, are any questions ever raised about travel to Iran, Syria or Sudan, three countries on the State Department’s list of terrorist sponsoring nations? For that matter, what about travel to Yemen, like Carlos Bledsoe did where he was indoctrinated to wage jihad in the USA by Anwar al-Alwaki? What about travel to the tribal areas of Pakistan, where the Times Square bomber traveled and received training? For that matter, how about travel to Saudi Arabia? After all, the Salafi strain of Islam that gave birth to Al Qaeda has its seat there and most of Al Qaeda’s cannon fodder seems to come from Saudi Arabia.

Then there is the whole present question of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood is best described as the forefather of all modern Jihadist terrorist groups. Its apologists and proponents claim that the Muslim Brotherhood has completely eschewed violence, yet the available evidence proves otherwise. HAMAS was founded as a Muslim Brotherhood wing and has been designated a foreign terrorist organization by the US State Department. HAMAS is one of the deadliest Jihadist organizations in the world, having carried out numerous Islamikaze bombings. And make no mistake, HAMAS has a large presence inside the USA.

There seems to have developed in recent years some romanticized view of the Muslim Brotherhood among certain naive political factions in the USA–and not just Democrats. Rather than being viewed as an organization in the political wing of a global insurgency, the Muslim Brotherhood is unfortunately being embraced in the West and the US. Senator John McCain, for instance, seems to have become smitten with the Muslim Brotherhood after meeting with them for a few hours in Egypt. But no one has embraced the Muslim Brotherhood quite like the Obama administration. The Obama administration has established close ties to Muslim Brotherhood organizations in the US and met with them at length and frequently. All indications are that the Muslim Brotherhood plays a prominent role in the Obama administration. Organizations like CAIR (the Council on American Islamic Relations) and ISNA (the Islamic Society of North America) were named unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation trial, the largest terrorism financing conviction in US history. (Attorney General Holder declined to prosecute these organizations when he came to office, despite intentions by others in the Justice Department to do so.) In the Holy Land Foundation trial, in documented evidence that was stipulated to by the defense, both CAIR and ISNA were identified as Muslim Brotherhood organizations.

And yes, a high-level member of the Clinton staff at the State Department, Huma Abedin, comes from a prominent Muslim Brotherhood family. Her father, her brother and her mother all have prominent positions in the Muslim Brotherhood apparatus. If during the Cold War such a person came from a family with extensive ties to the Communist Party of Romania or East Germany, there would have been ample reason to conduct a security investigation. But in today’s politically correct surreal world of Washington DC “go along to get along” culture, it seems that no questions can be raised. This is the same culture that looked the other way while a known Jihadist, Major Nidal Hassan, hid right out in the open in the US Army spouting Islamic Jihad doctrine, culminating in the terrible terrorist attack at Fort Hood.

Well, the Center for Security Policy DID raise questions. The Center produced a 10-part video course on the Muslim Brotherhood in America that every American should watch: http://www.muslimbrotherhoodinamerica.com. Among others members of Congress, Michelle Bachmann has written a letter to inspectors general of key Washington departments inquiring as to Muslim Brotherhood influence in Washington’s halls of power. For her trouble, the likes of Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Anderson Cooper and a host of Leftist media from the Huffington Post to the Los Angeles Times and MSNBC have attacked Rep. Bachmann.

They have all done so in a total vacuum of knowledge about the Muslim Brotherhood, the Holy Land Foundation trial and American fronts like CAIR and ISNA.

This all stems from a complete failure of our leadership to put America on a war footing in the wake of 9/11. Our leaders have failed to identify the enemy. They have failed to try to understand the enemy threat doctrine. In fact they have denied that an enemy threat doctrine even exists. As a result of this culture, an imperialist, nefarious organization with long-standing ties to terrorism and with goals identical to those of Al Qaeda itself, namely the Muslim Brotherhood, is treated as a friend, rather than as a foe. If you even suggest that the Muslim Brotherhood might be an enemy of America, Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Anderson Cooper will attack you as if you are a wild-eyed bomb-thrower. We are indeed through the looking glass.

Many people around the world are unaware of the war that has been raging in the Philippines. At the heart of the violence is the desire of Jihadist terrorist groups such as the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah to establish an independent Islamic state ruled by Shariah law on the island of Mindanao.

Along with the Islamic insurgency in southern Thailand, these Asia-Pacific Jihads illustrate the global war we find ourselves in. They also debunk the theory that US foreign policy, presence in the Middle East or support for Israel is the primary reason for Islamic terrorism.

No one can say that the Jihadists are killing innocent civilians in Thailand and the Philippines because the US supports Israel or because the US has troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Wikileaks documents have given us a clear view into just how serious the situation on the Philippines is, as well as the character of the global Islamic threat we face.

• US diplomats characterized the Jihadist terrorism on Mindanao as on a par with the insurgency in Afghanistan.

• US diplomats openly acknowledged in the secret cables leaked by Wikileaks the role Saudi Arabia was playing in funding the Islamic groups in the Philippines and declared that it must be stopped. This is a common theme around the world. Saudis fund Jihad with “private” donations (often from members of the royal family) while the Saudi government looks the other way and denies any support for terrorism. It’s called plausible deniability and the Saudis have been playing this double game for over 30 years. They fund Jihadist terrorism and claim they are our “allies” in the “war on terrorism.”

In the wake of the miraculously failed Christmas day Jihadi attack over the skies of Detroit, we are starting to see our governmental mechanisms crank into gear to institute policies to prevent terrorists from attacking us successfully.

Never mind that it was that very governmental bureaucracy which enabled the Jihadists to penetrate secure areas with explosives and come close to killing 270 people on Christmas day. It was our incompetent governmental bureaucracies which granted a known Jihadi a visa to enter the United States. It was our governmental bureaucracies which let him get on an airliner without a passport. It was our governmental bureaucracies which failed to recognize classic warning signs: ticket paid for in cash, no checked luggage.

Nevertheless, Janet Napolitano, who is evidently conflicted between whether the security system worked like clockwork or failed miserably, has had her department of Homeland Security see to it that no one stands up for the last hour of any flight (an order which has evidently already been rescinded) and Transportation Security personnel are redoubling efforts to tighten access to airliners.

Meanwhile, President Obama managed to tear himself from the links to declare the terrorist an “isolated extremist,” perhaps the worst mischaracterization made by a sitting president since Richard Nixon declared himself “not a crook.” Obama then promised a dragnet to find those responsible. What complete and utter hogwash.

This security and law enforcement approach used against those who are at war with us will never work.

We can button up airliners tighter than a drum and do body cavity searches of passengers and you know what will happen?

The Jihadists will drive a truck loaded with TNT through the front door of the terminal at a major airport the day before Thanksgiving and kill hundreds.

Or they’ll target subways and trains like they did in Madrid, London and Paris.

Or they’ll target shopping malls or schools.

Until we realize that this is a war and not a law enforcement problem and that these terrorists have a common thread, whether they are lone wolves or part of cells, it will keep getting worse.

The problem is Islam. Not Muslims, but Islam as practiced by a core of Muslims who largely control the Islamic world. Their goal is to implement sharia law. Their goal is not for you and me to convert to Islam, but to impose sharia on us. That is what they are fighting for and sharia is their doctrine as well. We ignore this at our peril. The reason for everything they do can be looked up in books that they wrote. Not just the Noble Quran, but books like “Reliance of the Traveler” and “Milestones” and “The Quranic Concept of War.” If you really want to understand where the enemy is coming from, buy these books on Amazon and read them.

There is a global Jihadist insurgency and insurgencies are 80% political/ideological not military. We can win the military side. But we aren’t even fighting the other 80%. And that’s what manufactures guys like this Nigerian, who was, like most Jihadist terrorists, wealthy and educated, even privileged. (This is NOT about poverty; don’t let anyone tell you that.)

The Jihadis are indoctrinated for years in mosques and madrassas. They don’t go “radical” by accident. It is a system. Go to the MEMRI web site and take a look at state-run television in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the Palestinian territories and even Egypt. You will be shocked at what you see and hear, especially on the programs targeted at children. Jihadis are not born. They are created. Furthermore, they aren’t created because the USA supports Israel or because the USA overthrew Saddam Hussein in Iraq or the Taliban in Afghanistan. Their agenda is much wider, longer and deeper than that.

The Jihadists did not slaughter hundreds of school children in Beslan, Russia because the USA supports Israel or because US troops are in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Jihadists killed 241 US servicemen in Beirut in 1983, blew up the World Trade Center in 1993, blew up a USAF barracks in 1995, blasted our embassies in east Africa in 1998, attacked the USS Cole in 2000 and flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11th 2001 before a single American soldier or Marine set foot in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The Jihadists didn’t kill 200 Australian tourists in Bali, Indonesia because the US supports Israel. They didn’t slaughter dozens in Mumbai, India because the US is in Iraq. They aren’t killing people in southern Thailand because the US is in Afghanistan. And the Islamic insurgency in the Philippines predates all of this.

There must be something else at work.

It’s called Jihad.

You can expect some type of Jihadist incident involving Americans to be in the news every week from now on. Some incidents will be violent Jihad like Fort Hood and Flight 253. Others will be civilizational or “stealth” jihad, such as refusing to allow bomb-sniffing dogs near Muslims based on some notion of religious “freedom.” This is the environment that fighting a politically correct war for 8 years has created. Get used to it.

Let me give you an example of what we’re up against. The best example is Saudi Arabia. Some in the US refer to the Sauds as “allies” in the “war on terrorism.” But if the Sauds are really at war with Al Qaeda and the Jihadists, then why don’t we hear about lots of attempts on the lives of Saudi princes (and there are thousands of Saudi princes)? They are not hard to find. Go to a casino or disco in London or Monte Carlo and you can find them and often without tight security. Since Al Qaeda was founded in 1989, the number of Saudi royals killed by their terrorism stands at 0. In that time, there was only a single documented attempt by an Al Qaeda terrorist on a Saudi prince, who just happened to be the minister of the Interior, in charge of a large portion of security forces.

In Saudi Arabia when you are caught shoplifting, under their Sharia law, you have a good chance of getting your hand chopped off as punishment. A woman gets 100 lashes for the crime of adultery. The Sauds behead people for more serious crimes.

Yet, when a Saudi is caught on the battlefield as a member of Al Qaeda by US forces in Iraq or Afghanistan and is turned over to the Sauds, what happens to them?

They are sent to rehab. In rehab they are issued crayons and paint for art therapy. (I am not joking.) After rehab, they are released.

Why do you suppose this is?

I’ll tell you why. Because they haven’t committed a crime as far as the Sauds are concerned. Shoplifting gets your hand chopped off, Jihad doesn’t even get you a slap on the wrist.

Does anyone still believe that the Sauds are our allies?

The Jihadists get funded, they get trained and they get granted safe haven. This happens a number of ways and from a number of sources and we need to go after them. Use our strengths to go after the ideological and financial and training sources. Until we do, expect this to get worse and worse. Taking our shoes off before getting on the airplane isn’t going to help one damn bit.

In an editorial column published on 18 December, the editors of The Toledo Blade point out that capturing or killing Osama Bin Laden would not defeat Al Qaeda and capturing or killing Mullah Omar would not defeat the Taliban.

The fact of the matter is, Al Qaeda and the Taliban could cease to exist tomorrow and the U.S. and Western civilization would still face a Jihadist threat. This overall war–which we at TTB believe should be properly called World War IV–goes way beyond Al Qaeda.

Already, there are spin-offs of Al Qaeda in the Asia-Pacific Region, Southwest Asia, North Africa, Europe and the U.S. These are loosely formed groups which are inspired by Al Qaeda and model themselves in some way off of Al Qaeda, but are not operationally attached to Al Qaeda in the classic sense. Bin Laden and Zawahiri don’t command them and those two Jihadi leaders could be vaporized by a JDAM tomorrow and the global offshoots would still exist.

(Incidentally, we believe that Osama Bin Laden is dead and has been for some time. More on that in a future posting.)

The Jihad extends beyond Al Qaeda as well. When the Jihadist terrorists attacked Mumbai in November of 2008, it was automatically assumed that they were Al Qaeda. When it was surmised that they were in fact Lashkar-e-Taiba, that organization was labeled as an Al Qaeda affiliate.

Now, it turns out that, while both Al Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Taiba are both Salafist Jihadist terrorist organizations and ideological allies, they are separate groups. One could be wiped off the face of the earth this afternoon and the other would still be waging Jihad.

Then there is the whole issue of Jihadist groups who are certainly NOT part of Al Qaeda. Hezbollah is the prime example of this. Hezbollah is Shia and, while they have cooperated with Al Qaeda in the past, they are definitely not part of Al Qaeda. Moreover, Hezbollah is perhaps even more dangerous than Al Qaeda due to their backing from Iran and a robust infrastructure set up on every continent, with the possible exception of Antarctica.

The fact that some of these groups are not actively engaged in ongoing operations against the U.S. or the West on a day-to-day basis should not be construed to mean that they are somehow not waging Jihad against us.

On one of the laptop computers uncovered in the investigation of Lashkar-e-Taiba after the Mumbai attacks, it was discovered that the group had a global list of 320 possible targets for attack. And the recon man for the Mumbai attacks turns out to have been a guy from Chicago.

It has been falsely and widely stated that Hezbollah has not been engaged in operations against the U.S. since the late 1980s. They have. Not only did Hezbollah help Al Qaeda set up the two East Africa embassy bombings in 1998, but Hezbollah was extremely active in the Iraq insurgency. Senior Hezbollah operatives were captured by U.S. forces in Iraq in the past few years and Hezbollah fighters were killed by U.S. G.I.s right along with members of Al Sadr’s “Mahdi Army” in Iraq:

America is, unfortunately, largely in denial about the war we are in and that makes victory all the more elusive. Too many believe that “killing Bin Laden” will end it or that wiping out Al Qaeda will mean victory. This is simply untrue.

There is a global Jihad being waged against America and its allies. It is being waged in Afghanistan and Iraq to be sure. But it is also being waged in Israel, Algeria, Somalia, Sudan, Western Europe, Russia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, the Philippines, Central and South America and, yes, right here in North America.

Despite public proclamations that the Saudis and Pakistanis are our “allies” in the war on “terrorism,” the Pakistani secret intelligence service (ISI) and wealthy Saudis (including members of the Saudi royal family) continue to support the Taliban.

The Paks provide training and safe haven for the Taliban in the city of Quetta, Pakistan and the Sauds bankroll the operation.

This should come as no surprise. Both Saudi Arabia and northern Pakistan are epicenters for Salafi Islam, a particularly violent, intolerant and expansionist strain of the Islamic religion. The Sauds’ strain is known in the West as Wahhabi Islam and the Paks are known as Deobandis.

Both are enemies of the West and particularly the United States and continuing to pretend as if they are friends is not going to help us defeat them…